


The Quintessence of Dust

by lesyeuxverts



Category: Hamlet - Shakespeare
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-28
Updated: 2016-09-28
Packaged: 2018-08-18 09:48:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8157850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesyeuxverts/pseuds/lesyeuxverts
Summary: The commandment is upon Horatio, as sharp as cut-crystal and as fine as a knife’s edge. It is sharp enough to hurt, to twist. His heart is like a piece of seaglass, torn from its whole and tossed about upon the waves until it is a small, dull, miserly thing.





	

**Author's Note:**

> __  
> If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart  
>  Absent thee from felicity awhile,  
> And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,  
> To tell my story.   
> (Hamlet, Act V)

The commandment is upon Horatio, as sharp as cut-crystal and as fine as a knife’s edge. It is sharp enough to hurt, to twist. His heart is like a piece of seaglass, torn from its whole and tossed about upon the waves until it is a small, dull, miserly thing. 

A piece of seaglass or a bead in a bottle will rattle against the glass, shake and instead of winning freedom, wear itself down until it is gone. After years of telling and retelling the story, Horatio thinks that his heart has been ground down from glass to base sand by it, shifting like treacherous sand underfoot. 

This, then, is the quintessence of dust. Being and becoming, breath and life, all wrought to the same end.

The air is chill on his old bones. Fall brings rheumatism and worse. 

Hamlet had decked himself out in white for that final battle, blazing and pure - the full conviction of the right he’d felt to be on his side his only armour. Horatio saw him fall, saw his duelling garments become his shroud, was left behind to bury him in them. 

He had told the story, had set it out in black and white, word and song - had explained Hamlet’s life, his motives and his means - had told it all, for whatever it brought him in pain of memory or sweet relief, knowing that his prince still lived in stories.

Horatio is old, and has spent the fibres of his being, has seen himself ground down into dust. He has no soul left to rise with an angel’s ministering wings, he thinks - he has spent his soul here, in the service of his prince. (It was all that he would have asked for, once.) His mouth is dry, his throat full of the taste of fine, cloying ashes. His heart thuds sometimes with a sudden-sharp, painful beat.

This too, he thinks, will pass.

*****

Horatio had been a student, a philosopher, an incandescence in flesh - ready to touch the source of light and be sparked. He had looked at new fashions and took them on, defied them, defied the old modes. He had been ready to scramble over rocks and rough-hewn walls in service to his prince.

He had bloodied his hands on those rocks in his prince’s service - had bloodied his own throat later, speaking until he had no voice, until the tale was told and told again, again. He had felt his blood welling out through the slick, sickening thud of his heart, his blood welling out through scrapes on his palms. 

His prince, his Hamlet, never truly his.

As a boy, he’d had boyish dreams - first kiss, first wisp of smoke rising from a cigarette, first time hands brushed against hands calloused from holding guns and swords. He’d wanted to be the one to nurse Hamlet when he was ill, to soothe his fevered brow and brush the high arches of his cheekbones with a soothing touch, to hold him until he slept…

...to follow him, even into his dreams, and guard his dreams from all ills that might come to trouble him.

He wished for … impossible things.

The reality was this - two students, overcome by wine, an inexpert fumble. Sheets slick with sweat and the evidence of passion. One sweet smile - ah, he’d had the knack of it, that smile - Hamlet smiled as though Horatio were the centre of his world. 

The shape of an idea, the taste of a dream, the heartbeat of a memory. Horatio - desperate, afraid, half-proud of his own daring - had loved him. Had pressed a kiss to his collarbone, had twined their legs together, had tasted that forbidden fruit. 

He knew, even then, that Hamlet was not for him - for Ophelia, perhaps, or some other highborn girl, someone Hamlet would love with every inch of his soul. He did not do things by half-measures, Horatio’s brave prince. 

He’d had no heart for his lessons, those days - oh, those halcyon days in Wittenberg. Natural philosophy, declensions in Latin, the stress and strife of heroic poems - all set aside, when he had any chance to leave his books and watch Hamlet practice his swordplay. Long and lean, tousled sweaty curls falling over his brow, his smile at victory and his graciousness in defeat - he was a prince in every sense, a prince to please every sense.

*****

His voice as smooth and sweet as aged wine, the warmth of his body as he clasped Horatio to him, the gleam of his eyes as he embarked upon another mad plan - these are all the things that Horatio keeps, memories that time cannot take from him, details that he did not add in his telling and retelling of the story. Those things are his alone, all that he has left of his sweet prince.

All that he would have asked with the fervency of youth was for the end to be inversed - for it to be Hamlet clasping him as he breathed his last. That was then. This, now, he has lived his life in storytelling and in remembering and in the small, shrivelled thing that his heart has become, curled around the days of his youth. Horatio is old, now, and does not ask for fervent, impossible things. He will be alone at his last.


End file.
